


The Last Enemy That Shall Be Destroyed (Is Ourselves) Is Death

by liketreesinnovember



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-18 19:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20196643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liketreesinnovember/pseuds/liketreesinnovember
Summary: Lannisters are always Slytherins, everyone says. Lannisters are Death Eaters, others might say, but never in polite conversation.Lannisters at Hogwarts AU.





	The Last Enemy That Shall Be Destroyed (Is Ourselves) Is Death

_Lannisters are always Slytherins_, everyone says. _Lannisters are Death Eaters_, others might say, but never in polite conversation.

Cersei, waiting in her secret heart, believes herself Salazar Slytherin’s heir until she is nearly fourteen, and learns that the old snake himself detested women. She and Jaime roam the corridors of Hogwarts in search of the entrance to the Chamber, tiptoeing along the stones long past curfew and finding secret places to hide and snog. Jaime never takes the game seriously, but to Cersei it isn’t a game at all.

Jaime never could understand.

He had almost been a Gryffindor, he tells her once. He had wanted to be.

“That’s why it’s got to be me,” Cersei says. “You couldn’t open Slytherin’s Chamber if you _ tried. _ You can’t even speak Parseltongue.”

“Neither can you,” Jaime retorts.

When Tyrion is born, rumors spread very quickly among the servants that the boy is a squib. The tiny infant that had killed Lady Joanna seems so unmagical, so _ ugly_.

Indeed, Tyrion appears to show no magical ability for the first few years of his life, and is stunted in other ways that become more obvious as the child grows, although not half so quickly as he should, it seems.

“He must be part goblin,” Cersei remarks as she looks into the cradle, wrinkling her nose distastefully, until she remembers that wrinkling one’s nose is an ugly habit.

Yet one day when he is four years old, little Tyrion proves himself to be most magical by levitating some of Lady Joanna’s priceless china and hurling it at full speed at his nanny for the indiscretion of trying to make him eat brussel sprouts. The poor woman gives Tywin her two-weeks notice that same day. Tyrion is made to receive his meals and all else in the isolation of his nursery for weeks after, and a new girl is hired to take the old nanny’s place. Despite further attempts to coax the magicalness out of Lord Tywin’s youngest while also minimizing the possibility of further damage to the Lannister estate, Tyrion never shows the slightest magical inclination unless it is to crack an egg over the head of his new nanny (one out of a long parade) or make a rat go up Cersei’s skirt.

“He cannot possibly go,” Cersei says when Tyrion receives his letter. “He’ll burn down the school.”

Yet go to school Tyrion does, with three hundred years of Slytherin ancestors resting on his smallish, crooked shoulders.

“Not Ravenclaw…” Tyrion thinks on the day he is sorted, hoping his thoughts are loud enough for the Hat to hear him. Ravenclaw was for servants and mudbloods, his father had said. Lannisters are always Slytherins, and he was a Lannister. He was. He was _ not _ a squib.

In the end, he needn’t have worried. _ I will give you what you want, _ whispered the Hat, _ but you won’t be happy. I said the same thing to your brother and sister, years ago _.

It’s not until much, much later that Tyrion remembers these words. He has few friends at Hogwarts, but he excels at his studies, and away from the watchful eye of Tywin Lannister, he finds that magic comes easy to him, and the cries of _ squib _ that had followed him for much of his childhood soon fade away. They call him other names, but he doesn’t mind it too much. Summers would have been the worst of it, if it wasn’t for Jaime.

In his third year, Tyrion meets a girl. His classmates jerk their wands in her direction and make mud fly at her as she walks across the green. _ Mudblood_, they call her. Tysha Crofter is a year older than him, and a Ravenclaw, and pretty even with mud in her hair, as she tries her best to ignore the insults and spells flung in her direction.

Something about the way they shout at her, the expressions on their faces, triggers something in him, and soon he is shouting the name of a spell he’d read about in a book and sharp pebbles fly in all directions with the force of hail, pelting all of them alike in thunderstorm of tiny, jagged stones. Tyrion is left with scratches on his arms and forehead, but the bullies disperse and he manages to remember the words to make it stop. There is a bleeding cut where one of the projectiles had hit her in the cheek, but Tysha smiles at him.

She calls him her _ protector_, and for a while he is. But even within the safe haven of Hogwarts, the outside world seeps its way in. What begins as merely a whisper can soon be heard in every mouth in every corner. The Dark Lord is returned. Still, even the most vicious children of Death Eaters leave Tysha alone at the word of Lord Tywin’s son. 

That is, of course, until the words reach the ears of Tywin himself.

And then one day she is gone, her name stricken from the school’s records. (Tyrion had seen it himself, one night, when he’d snuck into the headmaster’s office.) The girl who’d once smiled at him with mud in her hair seemed to be nothing more than a fading dream.

Even after he realizes what the words had meant on the day of his sorting, Tyrion never learns where Tysha had gone. Perhaps she had never really been there at all.

Jaime spends summers with Tyrion rather than his own friends, though they come around often, asking for him and speaking of important business. When Tyrion asks what the business is they laugh at him, until Jaime makes them stop and tells them to leave. And although Tyrion likes the attention, he can tell that there is more to it for Jaime than spending time with his kid brother.

“Do you have a dark mark, Jaime?” Tyrion asks.

Jaime doesn’t answer.

Jaime never answers the important questions. _ Do you know where she went?_, he almost says, but always stops himself.

Cersei marries a high-ranking Ministry official, and soon after, _ The Quibbler _publishes a story about the mark on her inner left forearm discovered by her new husband, though this is quietly hushed up.

Tyrion will remember this story years later, in the wake of his father’s death and his sister’s disgrace, and his own exile. He will also remember a story he’d read in a history book, about muggles in the sixteenth century stripping naked supposed witches to search for devil’s teats. That had all been muggle nonsense, he knows, but still he searches for the mark on his own body sporadically, compulsively. He doesn’t know if he is disappointed.

There is a war coming, Tyrion knows, a war that he was not made to fight. A war that his brother will not fight, and a war that his sister will never win.


End file.
